Getting fed up with missing calls due to the ridiculously quiet (even at the top volume setting) default ring tone that sounds like a lullaby, I tried changing it.

The first impression. Where the heck is the setting? The ringtone is a phone setting. The first natural place to look for phone settings is in the Phone app. No luck. Bummer! Then I remembered. Aha! There is the gratuitous "Apps" section in Settings where you change things that should be set in the apps themselves, like the camera resolution etc. Maybe the phone settings are there! Guess what? Still no luck. Yes, phone settings are there, but only things like call forwarding, voicemail number etc, but no ringtones. Oh sh_t! I was already willing to give up when I found it under "Sounds and feedback". Phew!

The second impression. You can select a ringtone from music files. There is a label to that effect that looks just like that, a label. Not a button, not a selection box, not like anything that looks in any way interactive. Just a label. I tapped on it anyway and... nothing happened. Well not quite, a new screen opened with Accept and Cancel, but otherwise empty. Is it because I put my ringtones in the wrong folder? My Music folder is empty, all my music is on the SD card. My ringtones were all in the Ringtones folder under Downloads. So I closed Settings, moved the Ringtones folder under Music, Opened Settings->Sounds and feedback->Ringtone->Select from music files again and... still nothing. Is there another setting somewhere where you can choose the folder? I went through the whole process about 5 times, moving my ringtones to and fro, until someone interrupted me with some work related question. When I came back, there it was, all my music files were listed on the screen, in their full Technicolor glory. All 4800 of them in one long list. It was lucky that I was interrupted while the damn phone was preparing that long list, otherwise I would never have found out that all I had to do was wait for 5 minutes to get the list populated. There was no indication that something was going on. No "wait" message, no spinning wheel, no hourglass, nothing.

The third impression. The list is sorted alphabetically and there is a search facility. Which sounds fantastic except... songs with similar names from different artists and located in different folders are placed next to each other in the list. If you want to select a song from a given album but do not know the song name, you are stuffed. My ringtones are in MP3 files without tags. That was lucky since I could look them up by the file name. But that also means that choosing a different one meant cancelling the current search and starting the (very slow) search all over again. No way of telling the phone to look only at the files in the Ringtones folder. After all, who would want to do that, play all the ringtones sequentially to choose the preferred one?

So there. I have chosen my ringtone in the end and I bl__dy hope it works and I won't miss too many calls because wouldn't want to go through all that again.

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